Amid reports that the emerging nuclear deal between the P5+1 nations and Iran would reportedly allow Iran to keep 6,500 centrifuges operating, a former CIA deputy director who served under President Obama has stated that this number is sufficient for Iran to build a nuclear weapons program.

Michael Morell, now an analyst for CBS news, made those comments on the Charlie Roseshow last week. Morell’s statement was analyzed by the fact-checking website Politifact on Wednesday.

One element that’s fully expected in a long-term arrangement is a limit on the number and kinds of centrifuges Iran can use to enrich uranium. Former CIA deputy director Michael Morell said there’s an irony in that.

“If you are going to have a nuclear weapons program, 5,000 is pretty much the number you need,” Morell, now a CBS analyst, said on Charlie Rose. “If you have a power program, you need a lot more. By limiting them to a small number of centrifuges, we are limiting them to the number you need for a weapon.”

In investigating how many centrifuges are necessary to produce enough enriched uranium (CONTINUED)

Thursday, February 26, 2015

What great cause could unite Prince Charles, President Obama, the Pope, the Arab Oil sheiks, the United Nations, the European Union, the Russians, the Chinese, Pacific Island Nations, most undeveloped countries, the glitterati of Hollywood, left-wing politicians, unrepentant reds, government media, the climate research industry, Big Oil, Big Gas and the Green Blob. It must be something posing a clear and urgent danger to all humanity?

No, the crusade that unites them all is the War on Carbon Fuels, focussed mainly on that most vilified target, coal.

The biggest group, and the generals in this war on carbon, have no real interest in the facts or science of global climate change – they see climate alarmism as a great opportunity to achieve their goal of creating an unelected global government. They have even laid out their plans in a document called Agenda 21.

This group naturally includes the United Nations and all of its subsidiaries, the EU, and left wing politicians and media everywhere. At a news conference in Brussels recently, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity, but “to change the economic development model” i.e. destroy what is left of free enterprise and private property.

The Feb. 11 event marked Iran's overthrow of the Shah, and featured anti-American and anti-Israel sentiments. (MEMRI)

Just weeks before Secretary of State John Kerry held new nuclear talks with Iran’s foreign minister in Geneva, Iranians were hanging Kerry's boss in effigy at a huge Tehran-sponsored rally marking the Islamic Revolution’s 36thanniversary, an event that critics say underscores the absurdity of the ongoing diplomatic effort.

The U.S. and Iran are trying to reach a final nuclear agreement by a March 31 deadline against a backdrop of ongoing anti-American hatred in the Islamic republic. Photos posted by the Middle East Media Research Institute this week show Iranians marching in front of a display depicting President Obama hanging from a gallows and carrying signs of Kerry, portrayed as a devious fox.

Hundreds of thousands of Iranians took part in the Feb. 11 Revolution Day, which commemorates the 1979 overthrow of the U.S.-assisted Shah of Iran. The Iranians, as they have in past, chanted, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” They also burned and trampled an American flag.

“The Iranians on the one hand want to get as many concessions as they can from America during the nuclear talks but on the other hand they are not ready to give up their anti-Americanism.”- Ali Alfoneh, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Speaking at an Iranian-American Community symposium,an obviously frustratedformer New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani posed a rhetorical question to his audience.

Citing attack after attack in which Westerners have been murdered—from 9/11 to Fort Hood to Paris—Giuliani noted each involved “a movement the president of the United States will not recognize”—radical Islam. He then queried: “What is wrong with him?” (CONTINUED)

ROME, Italy– Rome has dramatically stepped up its security in the wake of last weekend’s slaughter of Christians in Libya and the Islamic State’s overt threat to the city. Outside of Rome’s US embassy on Via Veneto, increased security has been stationed, and machine guns have appeared in the hands of guards. A special security taskforce has been convoked to plan Rome’s response to escalating ISIS threats.

According to reports, “the ISIS threat against Italy is now real and direct,” and intelligence analysts are saying that Italy “has never been so exposed.” (CONTINUED)

What is the Islamic State?Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations—upgrading his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims. The inflow of jihadists that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and volume, and is continuing. (CONTINUED)

Sunday, February 15, 2015

Arnaud de Borchgrave, who interviewed statesmen and despots across time zones and war zones as a swashbuckling foreign correspondent for Newsweek magazine, and who later led the Washington Times as editor during the newspaper’s early years, died Feb. 15 at a hospice in the District. He was 88.

The cause was cancer, said his wife, Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave.

Born a Belgian count, Mr. de Borchgrave was reported to have been 13th in line to the throne in his native country. He gave up his aristocratic title, although perhaps not the air of influence and access, and became a U.S. citizen and high-profile, globe-trotting journalist.

Saint Michael, the archangel of battle, is tattooed across the back of a U.S. army veteran who recently returned to Iraq and joined a Christian militia fighting Islamic State in what he sees as a biblical war between good and evil.

Brett, 28, carries the same thumb-worn pocket Bible he did whilst deployed to Iraq in 2006 - a picture of the Virgin Mary tucked inside its pages and his favourite verses highlighted.

"It's very different," he said, asked how the experiences compared. "Here I'm fighting for a people and for a faith, and the enemy is much bigger and more brutal."

Thousands of foreigners have flocked to Iraq and Syria in the past two years, mostly to join Islamic State, but a handful of idealistic Westerners are enlisting as well, citing frustration their governments are not doing more to combat the ultra-radical Islamists or prevent the suffering of innocents.

The militia they joined is called Dwekh Nawsha - meaning self-sacrifice in the ancient Aramaic language spoken by Christ and still used by Assyrian Christians, who consider themselves the indigenous people of Iraq. (CONTINUED)

By Dina Siegel Vann, Director of AJC's Arthur and Rochelle Belfer Institute for Latino and Latin American AffairsEarlier today, Argentine Special Prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita moved to charge President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Foreign Minister Hector Timerman with orchestrating a cover-up of Iran's involvement in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. This recent development only serves to deepen the mystery around the tragic, untimely death of Alberto Nisman, Pollicita's predecessor, who was killed just days after accusing the president and foreign minister. Despite the unprecedented nature of this crisis, Nisman's death has met with a strange silence elsewhere in Latin America.This has been an unfortunate pattern in the region. The AMIA bombing, which killed 85 people and injured hundreds more, remains, to this day, the worst terrorist attack on Latin American soil, and one of the most vicious anti-Semitic acts anywhere since the Second World War. But with the passage of time and a succession of aborted attempts at identifying the perpetrators, much of the indignation and interest in the case eroded. All the while the culprit—Iran, which was also implicated in the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires—continues to operate freely in the region. (CONTINUED)FULL ARTICLE HERE: Murder in Argentina, Silence in South America - AJC: Global Jewish Advocacy

Pluto, the Planet of Evolutionary Transformation

Pluto in its highest astrological or symbolic aspect, in the Jungian sense, is the planet of evolution, urging us to be all that Nature and the Cosmos intended us to be. This is right in our DNA according to esoteric Yogic science and tradition, which teach that the actual energy of transformation lies dormant at the base of our spine.